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Creating Microsoft Planner tasks from email using Microsoft Flow

Work is pretty hectic at the moment. To be honest, that’s not unusual but scanning through tweets at lunchtime or at the start/end of the day is not really happening. I tend to take a look in bed (a bad habit, I know) and often think “that looks interesting, I’ll read it tomorrow” or “I’ll retweet that, but in the daytime when my followers will see it”. At the moment, my standard approach is to email the tweets to myself at work but, 9 times out of 10, they just sit in my Inbox and go no further.

So, I thought I’d set up a Kanban board in Microsoft Planner for interesting tweets (I already have one for future blog posts). That’s pretty straightforward but one of the drawbacks with Planner is that you can’t email tasks to the plan. That’s a pretty big omission in my view (and it seems I’m not alone) as I believe it’s something that can be done in Trello (which is the service that Planner is trying to compete with).

I got thinking though, one of the other services that might help is Microsoft Flow. What if I could create a flow to receive an email (in my own mailbox) and then create an item in a plan, then delete the email?

The first challenge was receiving the email. I set up a new email alias for my account but my interestingtweets@markwilson.it wouldn’t trigger the flow, because it’s a secondary address.

This left me with a different message: Schema error for field Title in entity Task: Field failed schema validation. That turned out to be because I was using the message body as the title of the email and Planner was only happy if I sent it as plain text (not as HTML). I can convert the HTML to plain text in Flow, but the multi-line content still fails validation…

So far, I’ve been able to successfully create tasks from single-line emails in one of my Plans but not in the one I created for this purpose (it’s not appearing as a target and if I enter the name manually the flow fails with a message of Schema error for field PlanId in entity Task: Field failed schema validation“)… I’ve made the plan publicly visible, so I’ll wait and see if that makes a difference (it hasn’t so far). If not, I may need to remove and recreate the Plan.

So near, yet so far. And ideally, I’d be able to do something more intelligent with the task items (like to read links from the email and add them as links to the task in Planner) – maybe what I want is too much for Flow and I need to use a Logic App instead.

At the moment, this is what my Flow looks like:

When I have it working with marking the email as read, I’ll change it over to deleting the email instead – after all, I don’t need an email and a task in Planner!

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